See him as he travels along the road to Damascus: the inten­sity in his eyes, the purposefulness of his pace. He is a man on a mission.

His name is Saul, and he is making the 135-mile trip from Jerusalem to Damascus for a deliberate and expressed purpose. He and his companions are sort of a posse, tracking down dangerous criminals in order to bring them to justice. But this is not a scene from the Wild West. No, these men from Jerusalem are a theologi­cal posse, if you will, and the criminals they seek are heretics — "any who belonged to the Way" (v. 2).

We would better recognize both those heretics and their pur­suer by different names. The so-called heretics were actually the early Christians, and their chief antagonist was the man we later know better as the apostle Paul.

We so as…